Looking to expand the reach of your presentations? When you convert a PowerPoint file to video format, you can do a lot of things with it:

* Post it on your web site

* Post it on YouTube

* Burn it to a CD and send it to potential clients

* Post it on your blog or Facebook

There are several types of video formats. In this tip, I focus on Adobe’s SWF format. It’s easy to post on a Web site and most computer systems have the viewer. (If not, it’s a free download from Adobe.com. Look for the “Get Adobe Flash Player button.)

YouTube may complain if you use an SWF format that embeds a player button and other controls, but for other uses, the controls are great.

As far as I know, the best free tool is iSpring Free. I used it for the movie you see here.

When you install iSpring Free, you get a new tab in PowerPoint 2007 with the conversion tools.

The Quick Publish button converts your presentation to SWF format in one click.

Of course, you may need to set up your presentation appropriately first. In the case of the above movie, I added automatic timings for all the slides to match the length of the sound files that contain my narration. (I recorded the sound in Audacity.)

The result is just 3 files:

1. fixprompt.js is a JavaScript file that contains the playing controls

2. index.html contains the code that embeds the SWF file

3. Slide1.swf is the SWF file

If you want to put the SWF file on its own web page and link to it, you can just rename the HTML file, upload everything, and you’re set. But that’s not usually what you want to do. Instead, you probably want to place the SWF file on an existing page.

My HTML code, after editing, looks like this:

Here’s what you need to do :

1. Open the HTML file in your web authoring software or and text editor.

2. Select the text from the table tag to the end of the script tag, and copy it to the Clipboard.

3. Display the HTML code for your web page, and place your cursor where you want the SWF file to go.

4. Paste.

Here are some other changes that you may want to make:

1. The size of the movie may be too big. To fix that, change the width and height proportionally in both places (the object and embed tags).

2. Because the background of many of my slides is white as is the background of my web pages, they blend in to one another. So, I changed background color of the table. I did that by adding bg inside the table tag. That’s where the blue-gray background comes from.

3. I wanted to change the location of the SWF file and put it in an images folder, so I added images/ before Slide 1.swf in both the object and embed tags.

Ellen Finkelstein, is the best-selling author of How to Do Everything with PowerPoint 2007 (and previous editions for PowerPoint 2002 and PowerPoint 2003) Her award-winning Web site features loads of free tips on PowerPoint, the monthly PowerPoint Tips Newsletter, and the PowerPoint Tips Blog – http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com

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